79 years ago today, the Hood is avenged

Sink the Bismarck

A fun watch.

Can't imagine what it was like to be on deck of the Bismarck witnessing the carnage as she was being devastated by the British warships.

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the Hood is avenged

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I thought this thread was going to be about the Minneapolis riots. My bad.

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Can’t imagine...deck of the Bismarck...

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Imagine The Hood. A Bismarck HE shell found the Hood’s magazine and in an instant, she blew up. The ship was destroyed and sank in chunks with the loss of over 1000 crewmen. Only three survived and one of them lived to be almost 90 and died only in 2009. He never had much good to say about the Germans.

IIRC, the Hood went down in minutes. The loss of life on her was almost instantaneous. The Bismarck held on for almost an hour and a half as shells rained down on her.

Good to remember--and remember too the 104th anniversary of the Battle of Jutland is this coming Sunday, May 31, and then the Battle of Midway on June 4 (next Thursday).

I think part of what fascinates us about the story of HMS Hood is how much we don't know. British battlecruisers had blown up catastrophically before. But we don't know where precisely was Hood hit, how the hit caused the loss, and even by whom it was hit (there's a theory that it was actually a shot from Prinz Eugen)--or of course what improvements would have prevented it. And then add the good-versus-evil angle that applies to everything related to Nazi Germany ...

As for whether Bismarck was sank by the British or scuttled: it seems pretty well established that its own crew opened valves that substantially hastened its sinking, but it also seems to me beyond intelligent debate that the British battleships had silenced Bismarck's guns and the British were in the process of sinking it with torpedoes when the Germans opened the valves. Sometimes a battleship succumbs faster or slower to torpedoes--compare the ends of two Japanese super-battleships almost identical to each other, Yamato (link to Wikipedia) and Musashi (link to Wikipedia)--but the ultimate outcome was not in doubt.

The whole battlecruiser philosophy was proven to be faulty. First at Jutland, then here with the Hood. And, yes, British gun-handling procedures were most likely the culprit.

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The Hood is getting avenged right now in Minneapolis.

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I figured he was talking about some L.A. race riot of the '40s

Sabayon-Bismarck

Sabaton is fricking awesome